When it comes to John Berger, I seem to have inadvertently become The Geek Show’s go to guy. I previously reviewed Taskafa, Stories of the Street, a 2013 documentary film from Andrea Luka Zimmerman which used Berger as a narrator, reading excerpts from his own novel King. But I have to […]
Movies & Documentaries
Erik the Conqueror (1961) One of Cinema’s best visual artists turns to the Viking movie (Review)
In “Gli Imatori”, a visual essay featured in an uncharacteristically spartan selection of arrow video features, Michael Mackenzie comments on Italian cinema’s propensity to copy (Escape from New York becomes 2019: After the Fall of New York, for example) as this latest Mario Bava title released under the now transatlantic […]
Every Picture Tells a Story: The Art Films of James Scott (1967-84) (Review)
For all that James Scott’s name is on the cover, the main selling point of the BFI’s new archive collection Every Picture Tells a Story is the remarkable range of artists he filmed. There’s David Hockney, arguably the only living British painter whose name means something to the general public. […]
The Love of a Woman (1953) a modest, forgotten gem of French Cinema (Review)
‘En dix ans, douze millions de beaux bébés pour la France.’ With those words, Charles de Gaulle ushered in a new era of French ‘politique nataliste’ in 1945, a system of government incentives and social and religious pressures intended to address the country’s low birth rate. Women workers were seen […]
Lord of the Flies (1963) Literature Classic lives and dies on the shoulder of its child actors (Review)
Among those of us who value books as discrete physical objects – which is slightly more of us than is comfortable for Amazon’s share price – film tie-in editions are a wearying necessity, a crude imposition of a completely different style of art for crass commercial reasons. There are some […]
Edward and Caroline (1951) A progenitor of the romantic comedy formula (Review)
Out of all the titan directors of French cinema who operated between the 1940s and the late 1950s, Jacques Becker is perhaps the least well-known. He cut his teeth working as an assistant to Jean Renoir during many of his projects including the famed war movie, ‘La Grande Illusion’ before […]
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) One of the most important and influential British films of the 1980s (Review)
I’ve long since said that if you want to know what life in 1980s Britain was like, what it felt like, looked like and sounded like, then there is really only two films to check out: one of them is Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too and the other […]
Joe Orton: Loot (1970) & Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970) (Review)
“I was plunged into the dumps for weeks after seeing Entertaining Mr. Sloane”, wrote Mrs. Edna Welthorpe of the late Joe Orton’s most famous play. She was even less fond of its follow-up: “I saw Loot with my young niece. We both fled from the theatre in horror and amazement […]
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) a brightly colourful, carefree and sexy production (Review)
I have to level with you. I am besotted with Sophia Loren. She has to be one of the ultimate, if not the ultimate, goddesses of the screen. Frankly, in my eyes she is perfection. And whenever I watch a film with Sophia Loren I always find myself thinking: ‘God, […]
The Saga of Anatahan (1953) The creativity of the final film and the significance of subtitles (Review)
Josef Von Sternberg’s final film was 1953’s The Saga of Anatahan, out today from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema. Its status as a final film and some of the choices it makes become very interesting when paired with a comment Brian De Palma made in his recent self-titled documentary. He stated […]